My husband saw the cover of this book and decided that I had to have it. I don’t know if he read the back cover or not before deciding that I must own it, but I understand why he would buy it based on the cover alone. I love big cats, leopards especially, and a leopard with a typewriter head? Nice!

I’m finding the book charming so far and I’m enjoying Jansma’s writing style. My hubby did well even if he picked the book for the cover alone. I don’t read a lot of literary fiction. I’m learning that I need to pick up a few more. I should read more than genre fiction.

Truth and lies. I wonder how it’s all going to end…

Back to reading!

“F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Wes Anderson” (The Village Voice) in this inventive and witty debut about a young man’s quest to become a writer and the misadventures in life and love that take him around the globe

From as early as he can remember, the hopelessly unreliable—yet hopelessly earnest—narrator of this ambitious debut novel has wanted to become a writer.

From the jazz clubs of Manhattan to the villages of Sri Lanka, Kristopher Jansma’s irresistible narrator will be inspired and haunted by the success of his greatest friend and rival in writing, the eccentric and brilliantly talented Julian McGann, and endlessly enamored with Julian’s enchanting friend, Evelyn, the green-eyed girl who got away. After the trio has a disastrous falling out, desperate to tell the truth in his writing and to figure out who he really is, Jansma’s narrator finds himself caught in a never-ending web of lies.

As much a story about a young man and his friends trying to make their way in the world as a profoundly affecting exploration of the nature of truth and storytelling, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards will appeal to readers of Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists and Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad with its elegantly constructed exploration of the stories we tell to find out who we really are.